Cahiers de Corey

Sunday, December 14, 2003

The snow, it blows. Actually, with no particular place to go, like the songs say, it's nice to sit here and plan a mug of cocoa while the white stuff is general all over Ithaca. I'm back and it's been a whirlwind. The reading went very well—you couldn't wish for a more posh space to read poetry in than the National Arts Club. Good turnout, many people left clutching copies of Selah and Barrow Street and Western Humanities Review. Richard Howard read first in his trademark red-framed Coke-bottle glasses. He's a very entertaining stage presence. Jacqueline Osherow read after a break, and then me. I think I'm getting the hang of using a mike. People were very nice afterwards; I met Timothy Liu, Sharon Dolin, Kathleen Ossip, and Stephen Cramer, emerging poets all (well, Mr. Liu has fully emerged, I think). But the real thrill came the next day. After a fairly disastrous first meeting between Emily's dad and stepmother and my dad and stepmother, and a recuperative viewing of the expanded first chapter of Lord of the Rings at the Loews on 42nd and 8th Avenue, I made my usual pilgrimage down to the St. Mark's Bookshop. There, I was accosted—I believe accosted is the word—by a young man holding a copy of my book that he'd found on the shelves—I didn't even know the book was on shelves yet. His name was Ted Mathys and he was/is a poet (he has three good prose poems in the latest Fence and he was a fan. And he bought the book and had me sign it. More incredible than this was another poet, Daniel Lin, happened to be nearby, and he bought the book and had me sign it, leaving St. Marks with a single copy on their shelves. You could have knocked me over with the proverbial feather. It was a genuine rockstar moment and fulfilled most of the secret fantasies I've harbored since I first attempted a novel in the sixth grade. What to do for an encore?

Well for one thing, there's a reading at the Ear Inn coming up: Saturday, February 21st at 3 PM. Mark your calendars, New Yorkers: there's no avoiding it. You will hear me read eventually. Bwa-ha-hah!

Oh me. Oh my. I promise to get back to substantive commentary in the not too distant future. Yes indeedy.

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“Joshua Corey has reinvented the good old-fashioned American avant-garde epic poem (Whitman, Stein, Crane, O’Hara) and thrust it, kicking if not screaming, into the early 21st century, ‘rescued / by what survives the will to survive.’ The result is thrilling, and unlike any poetry I know.”

—John Ashbery

"Joshua Corey’s The Barons is a sprawling collection of poems intent on toeing the line between the profound and the glib, brainy deconstruction and guttural implosion. These poems are like toys cranked up to the point of breaking or like hurricanes whipped into speed and spinning furiously in place."

—Joe Hall, Colorado Review

Available from Omnidawn Publishing and wherever books are sold.

Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy is a darkly glamorous existential noir in the late modernist tradition of José Saramago, W.G. Sebald, Italo Calvino, and Roberto Bolaño. Written in gorgeous and elliptical prose, this electric first novel is a love story, a ghost story, and a psychological thriller about the enigma of American innocence, the fatality of storytelling, and the precarious destiny of reading itself.

"Corey’s prose registers the sensations, perceptions, and experiences of the novel’s characters — primarily the protagonist — in truly the only way such characters actually come to life: they live in language, and to that end the writing in Beautiful Soul, in its scrupulous attention to phrase and image in almost every sentence, could be called an attempt to bring the characters and their milieu to life through the vigor of the words on the page."

--Daniel Green, Full Stop

"We hold a letter, its creases worn nearly through from years of opening and folding shut again. Yet each reading is a revelation, a shock, a mystery, a challenge. Corey gives this a new jolt, a new charge, in this rich and intensely self-reflective novel."

--Spencer Dew, decomP

Available from Amazon in print or Kindle editions, from Small Press Distribution, and from the publisher, Spuyten Duyvil Press.

One of the Academy of American Poets' Notable Books for 2011.

"Joshua Corey's book of sonnets is formally playful and emotionally raw, with an intensity of expression that is at times harrowing. . . . [A]n extraordinary volume." —Paul Hoover

"These songs shuttle between a past and a future, cast adrift or severed from a violent, ashen present into a necessary untimeliness. . . . What then of the sonnet, repository of desire and enemy of time? It is, as ever, that form by which we re-imagine subjectivity to confront altered circumstances, and to assess 'the shipwreck of the singular' in the maelstrom of the many. . . ." —Michael Palmer

"In Severance Songs, Joshua Corey tends to the always-mysterious border that connects the interior and the exterior. Is one inside the tale if one alludes to it? Is the eye tethered as witness to what it sees? And who can avoid singing these 'culpability cantos'? Yet if the lush Eden of intimacy foresees our later expulsion, this poet shows us how to stand at the garden's threshold where 'reaching builds on reaching.' Corey risks the possible emptiness inherent in rupture to seek out the ways we are 'knotted to one another's possibilities.' The architecture of the poem, he reveals, is replete with doors and windows and it is for us to discover whether we are looking in or looking out." —Elizabeth Robinson

Now available from Small Press Distribution, Amazon, or your local bookstore.

Read reviews at Publishers Weekly, Wave Composition, The Critical Flame, TrainBust, Poetry Northwest, and in Spoon River Poetry Review.

Goodreads

Joshua's bookshelf: currently-reading

Swann's Way

by Marcel Proust

Slowly, slowly sinking into the astonishingly sensual memory-world of Proust. At forty, I think I'm finally old enough to appreciate it. Reading the Moncrief but I'd like to check out the Lydia Davis translation as well.

tagged: currently-reading